


A Time For Every Purpose

by Doyle



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: F/M, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-16
Updated: 2009-11-16
Packaged: 2017-10-03 01:27:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Doyle/pseuds/Doyle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>To everything there is a season, a time for every purpose under the sun.</i> Barbara loses someone she loves.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Time For Every Purpose

Monday morning, for once, seemed a welcome respite from the weekend. After the funeral and the interminable, lonely Sunday that had followed, it was a relief to lose herself in her O-Level class’s essays on the Stuarts, or 4b’s unanimous inability to remember the key battles of the Civil War. By lunch time she felt more whole than she had for days, perhaps since Thursday night at the hospital when she’d found herself, quite against her will, transformed from Barbara Wright into someone’s granddaughter, niece, cousin, the reliable one who filled in forms and made arrangements about wreaths and prayers.

Children, Barbara had always thought, were refreshingly unsentimental; they piled past her desk as the lunch bell rang, paying her little attention, and if any of them knew why she’d been absent on Friday, she doubted it bothered them very much. She’d been like that herself at their age. She would have been astonished at the suggestion that the aloof beings who taught at her school were as human as anyone else, that they had lovers and parents, that they read inappropriate books and wept at funerals. There was only one of the children who hung back when the others had gone, as if there was something she wanted to say: “Yes, what is it, Susan?” Barbara asked, and the girl blushed and mumbled that she’d forgotten her book, and darted from the room.

The air in the playground was cold and crisp and much more tempting than the noise and the smoke in the staffroom. She made a slow circuit of the wall, noting without being really conscious of doing so which of her pupils were playing games, or jostling in groups around transistor radios, or huddling miserably by themselves and staying out of the wind until the second bell.

She had come out here thinking that she wanted to be alone. She was still of that opinion when Ian caught up with her, but as he fell into step beside her she found that his presence wasn’t the annoyance that she might have expected. Instead, her solitude seemed to expand to include him; he was close enough to comfort without crowding her, and she wondered if that might be the reason why, after she’d been called to the hospital, she had suddenly thought of Ian.

“I’m sure,” he said, “you don’t want me telling you how very sorry I am.”

“Thank you, no.” She smiled. “My grandmother was a very old, very sick woman, and she’d be the first to tell me not to be so silly if I thought people should go around feeling sorry that she isn’t in pain any longer.” And because she liked the way he smiled back at her, kindly but without pity, she found herself adding the explanation she hadn’t given anyone else: “My mother and father died when I was very young, you see, so for years there was only my grandmother.”

“I didn’t know that.” If anyone had been watching – and in a playground of two hundred hawkeyed adolescents, someone was always watching – the touch on her arm was so brief they wouldn’t have noticed.

“It’s why I’ve been so very busy this last year or two, why I haven’t had time for anything outside school...” She came back to herself, realising she was answering a question he’d been too polite to ask, and he took up the conversation as easily as if he hadn’t noticed a thing.

“I think Helen’s got you some sort of card. She was passing it around the staffroom when I made my bid for freedom.”

“One day Helen will realise that nobody even knows what they’re signing when she shoves these things beneath their nose, and then her whole worldview will shatter.”

“Oh, undoubtedly. And the halls of Coal Hill will run with the blood of those who write ‘many happy returns’ on a ‘hope you recover from your operation’ card.” A frigid gust of wind made them both shiver. “I think the kids’ prayers must be paying off,” Ian said. “They’re all secretly wishing for a winter as bad as the last one.”

Her grandmother had loved the snow and the frozen Thames last January; childlike by then, and seeing all of the beauty and none of the inconvenience. “There are times when I agree with them,” she said. “I think I could quite happily see the school beneath a few feet of snow.”

“This is anarchy, Miss Wright...”

She laughed out loud, startling herself almost as much as the nearby first-form boys, who stared at this unprecedented show of humanity. “Bell’s about to ring,” Ian called to them. “Go and line up, go on.” The children scattered like birds.

“Sometimes I think it must be nice to be that young,” she said. “Everything timetabled for you, no worries more serious than long division, exams...”

“Short trousers, school dinners, embarrassing attempts to impress girls...”

“Oh?”

“Not that I speak from personal experience, of course.”

No, she thought, I don’t think you would have had to try too hard for girls to be impressed with you.

They walked together back to the school as the bell rang; slowly, so that even the worst of the stragglers got there first. “Ian,” she said, and when he stopped and looked at her, whatever she had been going to say slipped out of her mind – she suddenly remembered the funeral, the reading from Ecclesiastes her grandmother had always liked about everything having its time, and how she had found herself thinking that she must make more time for her friends. One friend especially, perhaps. “Thank you,” she said.

“I don’t know what for.” It was just the two of them in the playground now, and so it was safe for him to take her hand; it was something he’d never done. “But if you ever need to talk anything over, you’ll come and find me, won’t you?”

“Yes,” she said, and much later, when she’d forgotten most of what they’d said, she would remember his chilled hand in hers, their breaths suspended in the air, the leap of her heart as something between them silently shifted and changed.


End file.
